Vint Cerf: Big changes ahead for the Internet

"This year and the next year are probably the most significant years for Internet's evolution that I can remember," said Vint Cerf recently. The biggest change is the move to IPv6, which will give the Internet a much larger address space and ensure future growth. The current estimate is that the number of IPv4 addresses that can be allocated will be exhausted around the middle of 2010. He says the current lack of addresses, and the IPv4 32-bit address space, is his fault. "My only defense is that decision was made in 1977, at a time when it was uncertain if the Internet would work," said Cerf, and adding that a 128-bit address space seemed excessive back then. But IPv6 isn't the only project that will keep the industry busy. The implementation of domain name system security using DNSSEC (Domain Name System Security Extensions) has also gotten off the ground. If the DNSSEC is supposed to improve security on the Internet, the addition of internationalized domain names (the support for non-Latin character sets) is supposed to make it a more global place. Languages like Arabic, Cyrillic, Hebrew, Chinese, Japanese, Korean and so on, will all become a part of the domain name systems vocabulary.